I tried looking it up, and my brain just wasn’t making sense of it, but I haven’t had coffee yet so.
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Analog systems use signals or records that are analogous to the thing they’re recording, whereas digital systems describe the thing they’re recording using numbers. Our word “analogy” has the same sense: an expression is an analogy uses things in one example that correspond to something you’re trying to understand or explain. **In an analog record, there are continuous changes in the recorded medium** that correspond to every single change in the thing that is being recorded. **In a digital system, there are discrete numerical descriptions** of the thing that is being recorded taken at a sampling rate with a desired resolution.
Let me give you an example: If you use a microscope or powerful magnifying glass and look at the grooves on a vinyl record, you will see wavy patterns on the vinyl. These wavy patterns exactly match the sounds they would reproduce; the pattern is an *analog* of the sound wave.
If you use a microscope to examine a CD, you will not find anything that matches the sound waves: you’ll find a bunch of dark and light spots. These dark and light spots get interpreted as 1s and 0s by a CD player, which then takes that string of 1s and 0s and uses them as numbers. Those numbers describe the amplitude of the wave that the CD track records (I’m over-simplifying a bit for the sake of clarity).
In summary:
* analog recordings use something to embody continuous information that matches the thing it is trying to record—like waves on vinyl that match the sound waves that it records.
* digital recordings use numbers to describe the information that it is trying to record—like a string of numbers describing the sound wave that it records.
One compromise that is needed to do digital recording is that describing sound as a string of numbers necessarily means you have to sample that sound at various points. Digital sound recording breaks the sound into discrete bits of info, whereas analog systems are essentially continuous.
Some of the confusion from the use of the term “analog” comes from companies using the term in place of “continuous” as opposed to “discrete”. For example, some video game controllers have “analog” triggers or joysticks. What an analog trigger or button means is that instead of clicking on and off like a typical button, these triggers have a long trigger pull where it registers how hard you are pulling, and not just that you pulled it. An “analog” joystick registers the position you’ve moved it to, and not just a discrete tap in that direction like the old Playstation and NES controllers. But the underlying signals for these “analog” triggers and joysticks is all digitized; the controller sends numerical/digital data to the console, which processes this data like a computer would.
Two of the best explanations for the concept of analog vs. digital are these videos by Veritasium. Even though these are not strictly about analog vs. digital recording, the concept of analog vs digital is clearly explained with visual aids:
# Veritasium | [The Most Powerful Computers You’ve Never Heard Of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF3OX8nT0w)
# Veritasium | [Future Computers Will Be Radically Different (Analog Computing)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg)
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